Hello, Goodbye: Offsite Redirect Upgrade
“You say goodbye, I say hello.” - The Beatles — Needless to say, we hope you never want to leave WordPress.com. But, should the day arrive that you decide to strike out on your own and set up a self-hosted WordPress blog with the free …
Context & Ripple Effects
Leaving a hosted blog has long meant abandoning the URL your readers know. WordPress.com has been building out its openness toolkit since adding OpenID in 2007, and the departure problem was already being written about publicly by then — Technorati's Farewells and Welcomes post treated blogger exits between platforms as a normal lifecycle event worth marking.
The new offsite redirect upgrade closes the loop: a WordPress.com user who moves to a self-hosted WordPress install can now pay to have old URLs forward to the new site. It matters against the backdrop of 2010's rough patch — February's 110-minute outage hit 10.2 million blogs, giving restless users a concrete reason to weigh the exit.
First-order effects
- Bloggers who leave WordPress.com no longer lose their accumulated inbound links and subscriber base — old permalinks forward to the self-hosted site for paying upgraders.
- Automattic converts departures into revenue instead of fighting them, removing the single strongest argument self-hosting advocates make against the hosted service.
Second-order effects
- Hosting providers and the plugin/theme economy gain a smoother on-ramp, because the incumbent platform itself packages the migration path rather than leaving switchers to improvise DNS and redirect plumbing alone.
- Making exit painless doubles as a trust play after the February outage: a platform confident enough not to hold URLs hostage undercuts rival hosted services whose pitch depends on lock-in.
Third-order effects
- If portability becomes table stakes, hosted blogging platforms compete on convenience, uptime, and premium services at the edge rather than on captivity — viable here precisely because the open-source WordPress core guarantees the destination exists.
The trend: Hosted web publishing platforms are shifting from retaining users through lock-in to monetizing openness itself, selling the exit ramp as a paid feature.